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Where encryption fits best

There are numerous places to embed encryption into your backup infrastructure. Considering key management and performance issues, here are our recommendations. A tarnished corporate name and possible financial and legal liabilities head the list of management concerns whenever removable disks and tape cartridges holding sensitive information are misplaced or stolen. Encryption can minimize the risks associated with these inevitable occurrences. But with multiple methods available to encrypt data and standards for the long-term management of encryption keys still in their early stages, companies need to proceed cautiously. Encryption secures data and makes it accessible only to those individuals or applications with the proper credentials. Companies may choose to encrypt data in a number of places in the backup infrastructure to satisfy specific application or corporate requirements. For example: Backup software may include an encryption function that encrypts data on the client or on a designated server before storing the data. ...

Our fifth annual Storage Salary Survey finds that time in the storage trenches is paying off with bigger salaries. However, stress levels and workloads are also rising, as respondents have to manage more storage with less money and increased scrutiny from upper management.

Most new storage arrays automatically distribute data onto a number of spindles, which eliminates the manual task of selecting RAID levels. You can still manually select your RAID levels, but you'll need to balance availability, risks and costs.

Everybody knows they should encrypt tapes that go offsite, but many are still on the fence about where encryption should occur in their storage environments. There are a number of options, ranging from using your backup app's encryption capabilities to installing a purpose-built encryption appliance. We weigh the pros and cons of the available alternatives so that you can decide which approach best suits your shop.

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Web 2.0 tools and strategies hold many potential benefits for businesses that deploy them, but their requirements for rapidly scalable storage and access, as well as persistent data, pose significant challenges for the IT staffs that need to build and manage the infrastructure.

Data center projects often involve migrating data, which is frequently a painful process that can lead to unplanned downtime and outages. It's time to adopt consistent, repeatable migration practices. Selecting the right approach is highly dependent on infrastructure limitations, data and platform types, time constraints and staff capabilities.